MANCHESTER, decolonising, butterflies

To absolutely no one's surprise, I haven't kept up with this blog. Every time I've been to an interesting thing, I've considered what I'd write about the experience, the profound and satisfying conclusions I might draw about culture/society/life blah blah, and decided not to bother. It turns out that this happens to me roughly once a day, everything from a nice bit of graphic design on a poster to a great chat with a museum visitor at work, so if anything, not writing these things down has made me notice their frequency and their value all the more. Sutton Hoo is a particularly good example of this, as I visited on a crisp day in December when the sun was low and the Vikings didn't seem very far out of reach. But I don't think it's a crying shame that I didn't write down the thoughts I had about epic stories, or the landscape, or the (truly excellent) interpretation techniques the National Trust has produced. Maybe just go yourself, if you can, and you'll get it.

Manchester, where this post is really about, has felt worth discussing in writing, though. The main reason I started this blog was to make me think about culture and heritage in a non-academic form, yet my trip to Manchester was prompted significantly by my academic work. As part of my MA, I read a lot about museums - their history, their objects, their main issues - and Manchester Museum has recently done some fairly spectacular decolonising of its collections which intrigued me. It turns out that these headline-grabbing repatriation agreements* accompany a much wider strategy of making their collections genuinely relevant. Frankly, I was staggered by what a case of taxidermy could be. Despite being the most Victorian of buildings with high ceilings, timber arches and dinosaur skeletons, the Manchester team have slimmed down the displays so spectacularly that most rooms feel like a flagship exhibition, not the main collection. In each glass case are carefully selected objects which relate to a theme - 'Life', 'Peace', 'Weather', 'Disasters' - and connected in some really imaginative ways. I was captivated by the case which used weathered rocks and bones alongside a ticker-tape highlighting facts about climate change. It was so simple and striking that I watched the same facts scroll past in their stock-exchange style font for several minutes. This incredibly careful presentation of what is an essentially unremarkable natural history collection was refreshing.

The absolute highlight, for me, was of course an object which signified Manchester Museum's ongoing commitment to decolonising their collection and, closely connected, to making the museum a place of real conversation and life rather than dead stuff on shelves (though the bread and butter of the museum is, surprisingly, just that). The museum has an elephant tusk owned by the former West African kingdom of Benin's King Okeugbuda which was looted by the British during the brutal and murderous suppression of the rebellion against the 1897 Benin Expedition. Even though I have spent perhaps the last two years of my life thinking about these kind of troubled objects and how they sit in our museums, and more intensely than ever in the last six months, to see the story laid out on a display board in a building drenched in Victorian, imperial Britishness, was staggering. I was utterly taken aback to see it really happen, to see that a real and sincere effort had been made to tell the story without ducking the truth, linguistically or in collections policy. And the ceiling hadn't fallen in! The museum still stood, visitors still came - in fact, they expressed heated views in the book left beside the tusk, which is in my view an object of heritage in itself. As a document of our continued entanglement with race and colonisation, it is just as valuable as the stuffed foxes and fossils, if not far more. Most of the comments supported repatriating the tusk; some more were paragraphs long, considering the possibilities for keeping it or for returning it to the modern state of Nigeria. The commitment to their responses of these visitors was quite moving, reaffirming why I enjoy being museums and why studying these complex histories matters to me and evidently to many others too.

Manchester Museum is obviously a special case. Many more examples of this came to the fore - the curators performing a delicate object move in front of a watchful public behind only a rope, so we could see the process at work was one highlight - but its specialness is also an essential reminder of where there is still progress to be made in so many of our institutions. The problem that plagues many museums is stasis, not of their own making but bureaucratic and financial challenges that stop them engaging with these debates in all but the most lightweight ways.

These are (obviously, we know I will never shut up about these things) just some of the thoughts I had on the lovely sweaty Northern train back to Sheffield after my visit. Overwhelmingly I felt hopeful for the future because I know now that the difficult things I read about and the heated debates we experience every day about race and the legacies of colonialism can have solutions. They really can! And museums need not be repositories of dead things, aloof from it all, but very much living participants in a necessary and hard debate.



*repatriation - "the return of someone to their own country", according to Google, or in this case an object deemed stolen, usually by violent means such as colonial war or genocide.